This paper considers the detection of the presence/absence of signals in uncertain low SNR environments. Small modeling uncertainties are unavoidable in any practical system and so robustness to them is a fundamental performance metric. The impact of these modeling uncertainties can be quantified by the position of the "SNR wall" below which a detector will fail to be robust, no matter how long it...
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One of the main requirements of cognitive radio systems is the ability to reliably detect the presence of licensed primary transmissions. Previous works on the problem of detection for cognitive radio have suggested the necessity of user cooperation in order to be able to detect at the low signal-to-noise ratios experienced in practical situations. We consider a system of cognitive radio users who...
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Cognitive radio technology has been proposed to improve spectrum efficiency by having the cognitive radios act as secondary users to opportunistically access under-utilized frequency bands. Spectrum sensing, as a key enabling functionality in cognitive radio networks, needs to reliably detect signals from licensed primary radios to avoid harmful interference. However, due to the effects of channel...
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The increasing demand for the radio spectrum along with the inefficient usage of the licensed bands has led the regulatory bodies to consider opening up the under-utilized licensed frequency bands for dynamic access by unlicensed users. Such dynamic spectrum access is envisioned to resolve the spectrum scarcity by allowing unlicensed users to opportunistically utilize the white spaces across the l...
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Consider a communication system whereby multiple users share a common frequency band and must choose their transmit power spectral densities dynamically in response to physical channel conditions. Due to co-channel interference, the achievable data rate of each user depends on not only the power spectral density of its own, but also those of others in the system. Given any channel condition and as...
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Cognitive radios (CRs) have a great potential to improve spectrum utilization by enabling users to access the spectrum dynamically without disturbing licensed primary radios (PRs). A key challenge in operating these radios as a network is how to implement an efficient medium access control (MAC) mechanism that can adaptively and efficiently allocate transmission powers and spectrum among CRs accor...
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In cognitive radio (CR) networks, there are scenarios where the secondary (lower priority) users intend to communicate with each other by opportunistically utilizing the transmit spectrum originally allocated to the existing primary (higher priority) users. For such a scenario, a secondary user usually has to tradeoff between two conflicting goals at the same time: one is to maximize its own trans...
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Cognitive radios have been studied recently as a means to utilize spectrum in a more efficient manner. This paper focuses on the fundamental limits of operation of a MIMO cognitive radio network with a single licensed user and a single cognitive user. The channel setting is equivalent to an interference channel with degraded message sets (with the cognitive user having access to the licensed user'...
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Aims & Scope

The Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (J-STSP) solicits special issues on topics that cover the entire scope of the IEEE Signal Processing Society including the theory and application of filtering, coding, transmitting, estimating, detecting, analyzing, recognizing, synthesizing, recording, and reproducing signals by digital or analog devices or techniques.